What is the Future of Airship Content?

As this Expansion patch cycle comes to an end, and what we've seen prepared for these final patches, a question comes to mind. What happened with the Free Company Workshops and Airships?

I personally feel like the Airship content was suppose to be a centerfold of the expansion and yet what we got out of it was building parts in which the stats are cryptic and uninformative, time based exploration that takes way to long and offer littler interaction and Diadem which while yes, until we see the changes made when the last patch comes out just furthers my point that Airship content was very lacking.

One issue I've always had with XI was their excessive throw whatever they think might work and see if it sticks mentality.

My example of this are Pankration, Moblin Maze Monger, and Synergy/Ebon gear.

Pankration was released with TOAU and it was honestly a cool gimmick take pictures of targets however the better picture was based on their HP left and how well the picture was taken. You could then use these pictures to either exchange them for point, turn them into your creature to fight with or imbue a monster with unique abiltiies/traits(might be wrong about last one, doing this off memory)

You could say it was like Pokemon except the fights were done automatically and it wasn't very balance(granted same could be said for Pokemon). The first issue with this content was the lack of instances, in order to partake in this PVP content all the players on the server had to share a single battle arena, which meant lots of spamming and lots of waiting, just to get one fight in. Yada yada, the content just dies cause the Devs never really did anything to make it work, where the fun was there but the execution and lack of instances made it impossible to get it's foot off the ground.

Moblin Maze Monger, another fun concept, you make your own dungeons(granted limited in base design) but you had slabs which allowed you to augment the dungeon to your liking(Granted the overall flexibility/reward system was lacking). To be fair it worked for when it existed and it was a very ambitious project by the team at the time this is honestly something I'd love to see brought to XIV at some point, give people to make their own challenge bosses, add their own mob types and even bosses and have players challenge one anothers self-made dungeons.

This content was fun, but it did also suffer the same lack of upkeep with updates and like others it just died out.

Now Synergy, mainly Ebon gear, this was the content which came before the Magian Trials, the reason I mention Magian is because Magian was pretty much what Ebon gear was trying to be without the excessive RNG farming and craptacular reward for time factor. Ebon gear did come out at a time when the game was having a hard time figuring out what to wanted to do. It felt like something that was just thrown in to give people something to do but at the same time made the reward pretty cruddy that it just discouraged people from partaking in because the amount of effort needed to obtain really mediocre gear made the entire content worthless to do. Then when Magian Trials came around and replaced the excessive RNG of getting mediocre gear with content in which you could see the set goal for said gear and know how much time it would take compared to the other content in which from memory the NMs you fought had a chance to drop the item you needed but it also had I wanna say 3/4 chance to drop the one you didn't need.

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So apologize for the prelude but I feel this is important to bring up because I don't want to see airships become content that is just ignored after the next expansion comes out. When airships were introduced I recall promises being made that we would at one point be able to actually go inside the airships we made, that using the workshop to go into Diadem would actually affect the content based on the states of the airship. What we got however seems very bare boned, a longer version of sending retainers out to fetch items and at most the ability to pick "Hard Mode" in Diadem with the airship having 0 influence other than needing 1 stat in order to send it there. Which makes the other 3/4 states worthless in retrospect.

Airships lack adventure, even if it was piece by piece, I always felt Diadem should of been the content which allowed us to explore each island. Diadem should of never been 1 instance and the islands we could visit should of been based on the island we uncovered/found. This is what an adventure is. An adventure isn't one open-ended instance that is far and wide spread out in which you use your flying mounts to get around and the airship is nothing more than a stationary object that remains at the start of the instance which does nothing.

Even something like an Airship LB would of been an interesting gimmick to setup, something which made Airships feel like they mattered for the content but at the end of the day, they just feel like an object that could be removed and it would change nothing about the content. The Airships just become this unnecessary gil/time sink to create just so you can use it to enter the Diadem.

Airships weren't given the justice they deserved for player based content in an MMO, and I just write all this in hopes that maybe we can hear something from the devs as to the future of Airships in hope that it won't just turn into dead content once Diadem 2.0 is released.

Well after a while the stats become apparent, I like that they are cryptic. Exploring based on unlocked islands would of been a neat idea, and entering the airship might be something they could implement for the Diadem instance having part of the Diadem gameplay take place on-board the prior to docking/landing. As for the future, the next expansion will move the setting to a water/underwater space so it will be interesting how they incorporate airships into the mix, perhaps we'll be able to modify them to go on the water as well, or maybe they will remain ventures that now encompass underwater sectors? I would like a new zone altogether based on the expansion's topography. Why stop at Diadem? Why can't airships be used to send to other instanced like areas, this could be something they add on every expansion.